Category: Watchmen: Midnight

“I don’t know why Hollywood is fascinated by my book when they never care to film it as I wrote it.”

— Richard Matheson, on the adaptations of his novel I Am Legend

In a 2009 interview for Ain’t It Cool News, Terry Gilliam voiced some of his dissatisfaction with Zack Snyder’s Watchmen (2009), which he found to be “too reverential,” and claimed that his own adaptation would have been more loosely based on the original comics by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Although fans remain divided on the merits of Snyder’s film, Gilliam lightheartedly teased fans for their reverence to Alan Moore’s text:

See that’s the problem with fans. Fans are terrifying. I have always hated fans, because they have such high expectations … They have such high expectations! I thought “Fuck off, just fuck off. Let me fuck it up on my own. I can’t put the weight of you people on my back!”1

In a Feburary 2014 interview for ComingSoon.net, Joel Silver, who was once the producer on Gilliam’s failed Watchmen project, ignited a brief controversy when he argued that Synder’s adaptation is “too much of a slave to the material” and championed Gilliam’s revisionist take on Watchmen, based on a screenplay by Sam Hamm:

What he did was he told the story as-is, but instead of the whole notion of the intergalactic thing which was too hard and too silly, what he did was he maintained that the existence of Doctor Manhattan had changed the whole balance of the world economy, the world political structure. He felt that THAT character really altered the way reality had been. He had the Ozymandias character convince, essentially, the Doctor Manhattan character to go back and stop himself from being created, so there never would be a Doctor Manhattan character. He was the only character with real supernatural powers, he went back and prevented himself from being turned into Doctor Manhattan, and in the vortex that was created after that occurred these characters from “Watchmen” only became characters in a comic book […] So the three characters, I think it was Rorschach and Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, they’re all of the sudden in Times Square and there’s a kid reading a comic book. They become like the people in Times Square dressing up like characters as opposed to really BEING those characters. There’s a kid reading the comic book and he’s like, “Hey, you’re just like in my comic book.” It was very smart, it was very articulate, and it really gave a very satisfying resolution to the story, but it just didn’t happen. Lost to time.2

Silver, who has produced some excellent films over the course of his career, also produced V for Vendetta (2005), a stylish but politically incongruous adaptation of Moore’s graphic novel. For Watchmen, the metafictional scenario described by Silver would have been much further afield than any of the liberties Zack Snyder took with the source material in his film.

In March 2014, Zack Snyder and his wife/producer Deborah Snyder responded to Joel Silver’s critique in an interview with Mike Ryan for The Huffington Post:

Mike Ryan: Was ‘Watchmen’ the most ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ project you’ve ever been a part of? Now Joel Silver is criticizing you for being a ‘slave’ to the source material while touting a very different from the source material script that Terry Gilliam was going to film.

Zack Snyder: It’s funny, because the biggest knock against the movie is that we finally changed the ending, right?

Mike Ryan: Right, you used Dr. Manhattan as the threat to bring the world together as opposed to the alien squid.

Zack Snyder: Right, and if you read the Gilliam ending, it’s completely insane.

Deborah Snyder: The fans would have been thinking that they were smoking crack.

Zack Snyder: Yeah, the fans would have stormed the castle on that one. So, honestly, I made “Watchmen” for myself. It’s probably my favorite movie that I’ve made. And I love the graphic novel and I really love everything about the movie. I love the style. I just love the movie and it was a labor of love. And I made it because I knew that the studio would have made the movie anyway and they would have made it crazy. So, finally I made it to save it from the Terry Gilliams of this world.3

The Devil’s in the Details

Zack Snyder has often described his film as a love letter to the original comics, but his work represents a struggle between two different industries and two very different art forms. In its initial cut, Snyder’s Watchmen struggled to balance the authenticity that fans expected and the conventions of contemporary Hollywood filmmaking, which favors spectacle and brevity. Snyder expanded his film in the “Director’s Cut” and again in the “Ultimate Cut” but neither of those revisions provided a satisfying amount of character depth, especially with regard to the original “Minutemen” crime-fighters and their role in shaping the story world of Watchmen.

It’s no secret that the adaptation of narrative structure, characterizations, and aesthetics between media inevitably leads to something “lost in translation” but there are some remarkable cases of misguided adaptations. For example, three films have been based on Richard Matheson’s influential horror novel I Am Legend (1954) but they bear little resemblance to the source material. To the question of why Hollywood adaptations of his comics have never lived up to their sources, Alan Moore clarifies:

…it’s simply because they weren’t ever designed to be films. This is what I’ve been trying to explain to these stupid bastards for the past 20 years. They were designed to exploit all the things that comic books can do and that no other medium can. I wanted to give comics a special place when I was writing things like Watchmen. I wanted to show off just what the possibilities of the comic book medium were. And films are completely different. This assumption that if something works in one medium it will work as well or better in another, I’ve got no idea where that comes from.4

A crucial narrative element in the original Watchmen comics is its climactic sequence, in which a grotesque “squid monster” is teleported into mid-town New York City in order to fake an alien invasion. This outrageous culmination of a stylized comic-book-villain scheme was an ironic twist in an otherwise realistic treatise on superhero types, and it worked brilliantly. Whether they were economically or artistically prohibited, the filmmakers who adapted Watchmen decided it must be changed.

The “missing squid” is one of the most popular questions I receive about Watchmen: Midnight. Unfortunately, the ending sequence in Zack Snyder’s film, in which of Dr. Manhattan assumes the role of a patsy in Ozymandias’s plan to trick the US and Soviet Union into peace, is nested too deeply in the movie narrative be removed entirely. Further, it is impossible to cohesively recreate Moore’s original ending scenario in the film due to insufficient filmed material. Like Zack Snyder’s “Ultimate Cut,” Watchmen: Midnight is an experiment, and the challenge for me as faneditor has been to achieve a closer approximation of Alan Moore’s narrative and characters on screen.

Manipulating the fabric of this film has been a rewarding experience but it has also provided me with a practical demonstration of the pitfalls of adaptation, especially the formal disparity between comics and cinema. As a writer of some notoriously “un-filmable” comics, Alan Moore is well aware of that incompatibility:

If we only see comics in relation to movies then the best that they will ever be is films that do not move. I found it, in the mid 80s, preferable to concentrate on those things that only comics could achieve. The way in which a tremendous amount of information could be included visually in every panel, the juxtapositions between what a character was saying, and what the image that the reader was looking at would be. So in a sense… most of my work from the 80s onwards was designed to be un-filmable.5

From Moore’s perspective, the ironically titled Watchmen: The Motion Comic (2008-2009) could be described as the strictest rendering of Watchmen as well as the most abominable. Using limited animation based on the original comic book panels drawn by Dave Gibbons, the motion comic succeeds in cinematically representing some unique aspects of the comic book (e.g. speech bubbles) but its uncanny, constrained animation seems to prove Alan Moore’s theory of “films that don’t move.”

In the following video, let’s compare the ways Watchmen: The Motion Comic and Zack Snyder’s live action film visually represent the first page of Moore and Gibbons’s Watchmen.

Fundamentally, cinema is temporal. Like music, a film begins and proceeds, unceasing, until its conclusion within a set period of time. Today, video technology provides viewers with the means to pause, rewind, zoom, and so forth, but films usually are not designed for that kind of viewing experience. Considering his affinity for the free reading experience of graphically dense comic book panels, it’s unsurprising that Alan Moore has been less than supportive of film adaptations:

I find film in its modern form to be quite bullying … It spoon-feeds us, which has the effect of watering down our collective cultural imagination. It is as if we are freshly hatched birds looking up with our mouths open waiting for Hollywood to feed us more regurgitated worms. The ‘Watchmen’ film sounds like more regurgitated worms. I for one am sick of worms.6

Disavowing Hollywood renditions of his work, Alan Moore refused to let his name appear in the credits of V for Vendetta and Watchmen, arguing that he’ll never watch Zack Snyder’s film just as he has never seen From Hell (2001) or The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003). I’m often asked if I think Alan Moore would like Watchmen: Midnight, but I don’t expect he would have much interest in it. Moore intended Watchmen to be a comic, not a film. Watchmen: Midnight is primarily an editing experiment to continue the revisionary work in previous releases of Zack Snyder’s film and provide a more reverential adaptation of the original comics by Moore and Gibbons.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

I often receive requests, in person and online, from people interested in watching my fanedit, Watchmen: Midnight. Today is the fifth anniversary of the original film’s theatrical release, and to mark the occasion I’ve produced an updated version of Watchmen: Midnight. It’s currently available on DVD-9 (with new menus, pictured above) and MKV. I have plans to release a high-definition remastered edition later in 2014.

In addition to revised Tales of the Black Freighter segments and chapter inter-titles, this revision of Watchmen: Midnight also includes new opening and closing sequences as well as a color correction scheme intended to reduce some of the blue saturation throughout the film. Like many contemporary superhero/action films, Watchmen has a “dark” aesthetic and a blue tint. Unfortunately, this distorts human skin tones in Watchmen and obscures some of the incredible production design work that’s based on the art and colors of the original comics. Take a look at the following split-screen demonstration:

There were several experiences in 2013 that I did not write about until now, including some great opportunities to screen Watchmen: Midnight and talk about fanediting with academics, fans, and aca-fans alike.

April 17-19: StarFest 2013 in Denver, Colorado

StarFest is an annual science fiction and fantasy fan convention founded in 1977, making it one of the longest running fan conventions in the United States. On April 17, I led an interactive presentation on the history and methods of fanediting called “Fan Editing 101: Rip, Recut, and Remix Hollywood Cinema,” and on April 19, StarFest screened my fanedit, Watchmen: Midnight, in its entirety. Fanedits are typically screened in private homes and therefore any large public exhibition is quite rare. This was the first public screening of Watchmen: Midnight and I was happy that there was such a large attendance.

May 10-12: BlasterCON 2013 in Los Angeles, California

I traveled to LA for the FanEdit.org panel at a science fiction fan convention called BlasterCON. Four administrators from FanEdit.org, including Neglify, L8wrtr, Reave, and Blueyoda, presented on the history of fanediting and screened excerpts from their work. This was the first public presentation by an organized fanediting community and it was great to see representatives from FanEdit.org discuss fanediting in their own words. After the organized panel presentation I screened comparative excerpts from Watchmen: Midnight for the FanEdit.org admins and enjoyed a nice exchange of ideas over the weekend.

July 4-5: MASH 2013 in Maastricht, the Netherlands

Next, I jetted to Europe for two academic conferences. The first was Making and Sharing: Conference on Audience Creativity (MASH) hosted by Maastricht University. MASH brought together scholars in fan studies and media studies with some very engaging research. For my part, I presented on fanediting and screened excerpts from Watchmen: Midnight with commentary. Following the rewarding experiences I had in Denver and LA at fan conventions, it was great to continue my tour with a presentation to an audience of academics who share close associations with fans and their work. I especially enjoyed the respective keynotes by Kristina Busse and George Landow, as well as Tisha Turk‘s presentation on authorship and production methods in vidding.

Also on my panel, Shannon Brownlee presented her excellent mashup video, Battleship Isildur, which combines footage The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), and Battleship Potemkin (1925) in a nearly seamless recontextualization of the miserable Orcs of Mordor. Suffering under the rule of Saruman, the Orcs produce a champion who calls on them to rise up against their oppressors and defend the innocent citizens of an city. Scenes from Sergei Eisenstein’s original film, such as the Odessa steps confrontation, are frequently excerpted for film studies courses and textbooks as exemplary in their application of parallel cutting and juxtaposition. However, Brownlee’s Battleship Isildur adds further dimensions to that scene and tests the limits of parallel action in an altogether fascinating narrative experiment.

July 29-August 2: Repeat-Remix-Remediate in Hamburg, Germany

The second leg of my visit to Europe was Repeat-Remix-Remediate: Modes and Norms of Digital Repurposing, a week-long symposium hosted by the Research Center of Media and Communication at Universität Hamburg. Structured like a summer school for a select group of PhD students in media studies, the program featured keynote presentations by international scholars, interactive workshops, and screenings, as well as excursions throughout the city, including a visit to Studio Hamburg ARD. There were many highlights from this event, including keynotes from Mirko Tobias Schäfer, Nishant Shah, and Allison Eden. Among the student delegates, Owen Gallagher and Martin Leduc provided some of my favorite presentations, both with a focus on critical remix videos.

During my panel, I was provided with ample time to introduce fanediting to the audience of faculty and graduate students and screened comparative scenes from Watchmen: Midnight. After my formal presentation, I continued the exhibition of my fanedit in a video gallery that was specially installed for the week’s activities. My gratitude to the organizers of Repeat-Remix-Remediate, especially Andreas Stuhlmann and Uwe Hasebrink, for assembling such an exciting and hospitable program.